“Bleeding us Dry” – Well Red Mag special

Issue 2 of Well Red, the new full-colour magazine for Liverpool supporters by Liverpool supporters is out now.

But the man behind the magazine, Gareth Roberts, has also brought out a special free download edition of the magazine, all about “debts, lies and Rafa”.

In the words of the magazine itself: “Well Red is the voice of the people that count at Liverpool Football Club – the fans. Packed with quality articles about all things Anfield – on and off the pitch – the full-colour magazine is a cracking read for any Red.

“Well Red offers honest opinions on the issues of the day at our great club, exclusive interviews and features about the glory days and contributions from some of the best Liverpool FC writers around.”

The free and print versions include pieces written by Dion Fanning, Tony Barrett, Liam Tomkins, Claire Jones, Gareth Roberts and some guys we’ve never heard of going by the names of Andy Heaton and Jim Boardman. In the print version there are many more articles, including contributions from Dave Kirkby, Richard Buxton and Paul Tomkins along with exclusive interviews with Roy Evans and George Sephton.

19 thoughts on ““Bleeding us Dry” – Well Red Mag special”

thanks again hicks and nob head you done it again rafa was a wicked manager and he was forced out and made to look 2nd rate he loved lfc and stud up to u cocks u took our club and kicked it in the balls as hard as u could . now we r on our knees and looking up at every team improving while we stand still. u tight selfish don’t know shit cunts if you gave him money we would have had class players and we would not be in the position we r in now . thank you will always walk alone and rafa i will miss u good luck . well it can only get better for you but we are still fucked

thanks again hicks and nob head you done it again rafa was a wicked manager and he was forced out and made to look 2nd rate he loved lfc and stud up to u . u took our club and kicked it in the balls as hard as u could . now we r on our knees and looking up at every team improving while we stand still. u tight selfish don’t know nothing nobs if you gave him money we would have had class players and we would not be in the position we r in now . you will always walk alone and rafa i will miss u good luck . well it can only get better for you but we are still in deep

Yes Joe, how observant of you. In fact the free magazine was produced so it would stand as a historic document of how it used to be before the dawn of the new Christian era.

Now that Rafa’s gone the club has no more problems, the recovery has already begun and we’ll win all silverware put in front of us next season. Doesn’t matter who comes in to replace the manager, doesn’t matter about the budget he gets, Rafa’s single-handed attempts to ruin the club have been foiled and we’ve only got greatness in front of us. Alex Ferguson is said to have been inconsolable at the impending dawn of a new era for Liverpool, Roman Abramovich is said to be looking to hire hitmen for Martin Broughton’s sabotage of Chelsea’s future hopes of league glory.

A statue of Christian Purslow is being cast as I speak, and will be erected alongside Shankly’s just as soon as they can get a tall enough plinth for it.

Money’s no object, not now Rafa’s gone. RBS have waived the interest on the loan, and have donated enough to pay off what the club owed the owners, freeing the club from the shackles of mounting debt attracting interest at 10% per year. The party mood has extended to the States, where Tom and George are about to announce the conversion of their shares in the club to a new charitable foundation that will ensure Liverpool are never broke again. They don’t want a profit, they want Liverpool to be great. Season ticket prices will be cut in half as part of this process.

Work on the new stadium has begun at an alarming pace, turns out Rafa had been hiding the steel and sabotaging contracts with construction companies. The new ground will be open in time for the 2011-12 season.

Jim
Shame you cannot put your obvious intellect to objective use.
Funny, but silly.
Rafa didn’t love Liverpool. Rafa was out for Rafa. The yanks didn’t make the weekly decisions on who plays. Purslow didn’t have a blind spot to the obvious limitations of El Hazar, Lucas, and Ngog. Neither of them pissed off great players like Riera and Alonso so they had to leave.
Rafa wasn’t THE problem, but he certainly caused his share of them.
But, fortunately for people like you, there are so many distractors around Anfield right now that you can ignore the obvious.
Rafa gone = success? No, but it certainly is one step in the right direction.

Not sure where you got all those comments from about Rafa loving Liverpool, and Purslow having/not having a blind spot for El Zhar and Ngog (combined fees of £1.7m) or why you’ve even brought Lucas into it.

If you think Riera would have been treated any better under any manager from Kenny to even Souness then you need to go and check out what he actually did that should have seen him turfed out even earlier. The so-called cold Benitez was often too bloody soft with certain players, if anything, but you carry on believing the kind of myths that came from people who have their own axes to grind.

For most of the season at the end of which we tried to sell Xabi the first time we had too many central midfielders – Xabi, Masch, Gerrard – with Lucas as backup. We could only play two of them. The 4-2-3-1 formation that had Gerrard further forward wasn’t considered to be the way forward for every game of the following season, Barry and Keane intended as ways of giving the manager more options and more depth of quality.

Keane didn’t work out (I wonder if he regrets pulling his face quite so much at being subbed, because he got the same treatment if not worse back at Spurs) but Benitez recognised this and cut his losses. Except he didn’t get the £16m back again for a more suitable forward – hence the need to rely to on Ngog and (when recovered from injury) El Zhar. And do you really think Rafa wanted Voronin – the unhappy, fed up, hopeless Voronin – back in his squad for the start of that last season? The one that began just after the owners and their MD pulled the transfer rug from under the manager’s feet.

By the way – Rafa has gone. Purslow and the owners haven’t, and they’ve added Broughton.

I’ll say one thing, there is no way Rafa could stay at the club with the way it was being run this past year. For Rafa to stay Purslow would either need to go or need to be watched by Broughton. And Purslow won, as simple as that.

In fact isn’t it strange that Purslow could speak out against the owners to SOS and still be here? Is Purslow unsackable?

In my view I would never have said I was 100% sure that Rafa should stay, certainly not without certain changes being made and situations being accepted.

In my view I am 100% sure that Christian Purslow should go. 100% sure. I see absolutely no reason why he should stay, and the longer he stays the worse things will get.

Purslow should have gone well before the end of the season. That doesn’t mean Rafa would – or should – have stayed after that. But Purslow shouldn’t be here.

But you carry on justifying to yourself why you shouted for Rafa’s head. Keep shouting it now, louder still. Because Purslow’s moved on, he’s one step nearer his ultimate goal now.

Don’t forget, in case you have, Rafa has gone. He’s not here any more. So there’s no need to worry about him now. He’s not going to speak out.

And so there isn’t that “distractor” for you now – you can open your eyes and work out if Christian Purslow should be here, in that job, with all that power, and nobody to speak out against it.

You’re not dense (that I know of!) but his ultimate goal doesn’t seem (to me) to be what it should be.

He said he was brought in to find £100m of investment. He failed, clearly, but I think he also mentioned looking at 100% sale of the club when he spoke to SOS.

He was approached, after initial contact was made through one of the owners, about an offer to provide finance to the club (for the stadium). The person with the proposal said later that they were completely ignored, which seems more than a little odd to me. Even if the finance offer for the stadium wasn’t suitable (and he’d not actually checked to see if it was) surely this was a lead – you meet this person, you discuss their offer, you explain your needs, you see if there’s a deal that can be done. Someone with access to money to put into LFC was ignored. I still haven’t heard a reasonable explanation for that. And surely that new stadium was the whole reason we wanted new owners anyway.

He was here when Rafa got his new deal, yet in no time at all he was undermining the manager (in a number of ways). Makes no sense to me. Especially with such an expensive compensation amount to potentially pay. Why not block the new contract in the first place?

He’s also been slagging the owners off to SoS, according to their minutes. If he was trying to attract someone to come in and put £100m for a percentage of the club, why tell the world (via SoS) that the bank have had enough of the owners and other such criticisms? Who’d want to be a partner under those circumstances?

That in itself should also have been enough for the owners to ask him to step aside – unless they didn’t believe the SoS version. But that wouldn’t be their only reason anyway. So why is he still here?

It’s like he’s unsackable, somehow.

Maybe he just likes being the main man in the director’s box, the face of Liverpool FC, Kenny’s mate, and he fears losing that.

Maybe he’s happy to see us fall into just enough of a decline to leave the owners to sell up at a cut-price (for them) amount – just low enough for Purslow’s MidOcean investors to come in?

At the moment I don’t know what his ultimate goal is, but to me I can’t fit his actions into an ultimate goal of helping the club back to greatness again.

The SOS minutes are curious. What he said in the way he said it, he must’ve realised that he wouldn’t be sacked as a result. To me, either Hicks and Gillett didn’t have the power to sack him suggesting RBS having a say so, or he said what he said with H&G’s say so – what better way to convince the public that you’re not acting on the best interests of someone by slagging them off?

I dunno, none of this adds up. I’ve written and re-written about a thousand words in this post before deleting them, saying Purslow could be with RBS this and Purslow could be with H&G that but I’ve come to a third option, maybe Purslow is with Purslow. Maybe Purslow wants to run the world himself. Someone from a paper rife with Liverpool friendly journalists told a friend months ago that he was a fantasist.

On by the way, I had to laugh at your old mate having a dig at Rafa very recently. When I read that (had to given the furore it had caused), it smacked of being personal. I thought about what someone had told me about him being banned from Melwood and it all added up. What a 2wat that guy is. The thing that got me is that he had a dig at Liverpool fans by suggesting we idolise our managers too much but no true fan would ever suggest this and really mean it.

It smacked of the petulant backlash of a spoilt brat, once idolised for his work in a respectable newspaper but now left to be abandoned by those that once held him so in high regard. The problem is, he did this to himself the moment he left and sold his soul to the devil. I think deep down he probably realises this and regrets it.

I know what you mean Martin about trying to make some sense of it, it’s hard to do that but nothing points to him being a fine upstanding guy, here to just basically save the club from the impending doom.

The one that Purslow is working for Purslow is the one that makes most sense. Except it doesn’t explain why he’s not been sacked. (Unless we can’t afford to sack him). But fantasist strikes me as a good description.

Today’e latest news and entirely predictable.
“Liverpool co-owner Tom Hicks has decided to put personal gain above the club’s future again by rejecting two ‘perfect’ offers from investors to buy the Anfield giants despite George Gillett’s willingness to agree to a sale.

Texan Hicks has decided to risk the wrath of Liverpool fans as it was revealed that the American will not budge from his own valuation of the club at £800 million, despite the current global economic climate making it almost impossible for anyone to want to buy at that price. With Liverpool also not in the Champions League next season and struggling to build a team capable of challenging in the Premier League, the club’s value will continue to drop every day until fresh investment can be had.

With his own personal finances also suffering a blow after announcing that his Major League Baseball franchise the Texas Rangers filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago, Hicks is unlikely to care much about the feelings on the Kop as he hopes to receive a big payoff from Liverpool’s sale.

The American’s refusal to cooperate has led to much annoyance from Barclays Capital who were tasked to find new investors for Liverpool. The financial institution stated that there have been two “perfect fit” offers from investors – one from the Middle East and the other from America – that could have been advanced had Hicks agreed to a more realistic price.

It is now rumoured that the Royal Bank of Scotland – Liverpool’s creditors – will now threaten to foreclose on the club’s loan of £237 million unless they find new owners within a few months. The bank had agreed to an extension of the loan for a further 12 months only months ago on the agreement that the club would make good on a deal to acquire fresh investment by replacing the two American co-owners.”

Kenny wants to replace Rafa, but it’s for the board to decide if he’s the best possible replacement the club can get. He’s told friends he’d like the job, but “he is not willing to compromise the club in any way by making his interest in the position known”. If he publicly declares his interest it almost forces the club’s hand, suggestion being that he wants to get the job because he’s considered the best choice, not because the club were pressurised into giving it to him.

Jim,
Yes, but is Kenny as close to Purslow as has been implied by those more knowledgeable than me ? And if so, given Kenny’s unimpeachable credentials what does that say about Purlow’s integrity in view of the doubts about him being expressed not only on this site ?

They’re certainly friends, not sure how close they’d describe themselves as being, but we’ve all got friends who do things we don’t exactly approve of. We all deal with that in different ways.

We also usually trust our friends too, so if we’re concerned about something and then ask them, we’ll generally give them the benefit of the doubt. Purslow’s very good at sounding genuine about one thing or other, if you already trusted him to start with you’d probably fall for it every time.

It would be interesting one day to hear Kenny questioned about some of the doubts I and others have over Purslow. But it’s not that likely to happen.